Sunday, October 28, 2018

Trump Is Running Scared of Socialism

If you want proof
that the growing popularity of socialism poses a real threat to the Trump
administration — and to the dominance of market fundamentalism over the US
economy — just look at a panicky report released Tuesday by the White House
Council of Economic Advisers (CEA).

Titled “The
Opportunity Costs of Socialism,” the seventy-two-page document is a
capitalist retort to rising calls for redistributive policies. Ostensibly (and
bizarrely) released in recognition of “the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s
birth,” the report acknowledges that “self-declared socialists are gaining
support in Congress and among much of the electorate.”

Indeed, by the
time the 2018 midterm elections come to a close, there will almost assuredly be
three self-described socialists serving in the US Congress — Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Bernie Sanders — along with dozens more in
state and local offices throughout the United States. But it’s not just the
historic growth in electoral power for socialists that has the current
government worried. It’s the widespread embrace of socialism and
social-democratic policies by the American public.

Medicare for All,
a policy cornerstone of the resurgent American socialist movement, is supported by
70 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans. Policies such as
a $15 minimum wage, a federal jobs guarantee, higher
taxes for the wealthy and corporations, free public college, and urgent
action to tackle climate change all similarly boast majority support.
And more and more candidates are running on these ideas, as current office
holders push for legislation that would make them US law.

Clearly the Right
is losing the war of ideas. Apparently they hope an eye-glaze-inducing white
paper will help pull the public back into their camp.

The Ghost of
Thatcher

The report frames
its critique of socialism by quoting former UK prime minister Margaret
Thatcher’s oft-cited claim that “Socialist governments … always run out of
other people’s money,” and thus the way to prosperity is for the state to give
“the people more choice to spend their own money in their own way.”

It’s appropriate
that the authors take the Iron Lady’s words as gospel, since she was similarly
distressed by “creeping socialism” and used her time in power
to push neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, privatization, and
austerity coupled with attacks on voting rights and organized labor.

The ruthless
ideology grounding Thatcher’s market-centric economic philosophy, “monetarism,”
was revealed by Alan Budd, one of her economic advisers, in 1992 when he called monetarism

a very, very good
way to raise unemployment and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable
way of reducing the strength of the working classes. So what was engineered
there, in Marxist terms, was a crisis of capitalism which recreated a reserve
army of labor and has allowed the capitalist to make high profits ever since.

Such high profits
for the super rich are the type of benchmarks the CEA sets for judging economic
success. Throughout the report, the authors consistently use “growth” as a
marker for how capitalist economies are able to outperform socialist ones.
(Never mind that a full 95 percent of income gains in the
growth years following the Great Recession — from 2009 to 2013 — went to the
top 1 percent.)

Inequality levels
in the United States continue to rival those of the Gilded
Age, while the racial wealth gap grows ever larger and
millions of Americans go without adequate access to housing, education, health
care, and other basic needs.

But these are not
the concerns of the CEA analysts. Instead, they employ a series of absurd
Friedmanite graphs, odd references to discarded Christmas sweaters as
representations of mixed value (“the recipients of Christmas gifts sometimes
value the gifts less than they cost the giver, as exemplified by Christmas
sweaters that are never taken out of the closet to be worn”), and strange
claims that “owning and operating a pickup truck costs the average worker in a
Nordic country substantially more than it costs the average American worker” to
prove that capitalism must be the only system capable of ushering in true
“economic freedom.”

At no point,
however, does the report address the fact that the kind of “economic freedom”
the report’s authors are championing is incompatible with a profit-driven order
that systematically deprives large swaths of the population of the freedom to
live in an affordable home, be taught in a fully funded school, and access
lifesaving medical care without breaking the bank.

Whose Economic
Freedom?

In fact, what the
CEA authors really mean when they talk about “economic freedom” is the freedom
of the market to determine the functioning of the economy — freedom for the few
to have no limits on how much wealth they can accumulate while the many are
deprived of the freedoms that come from having their basic needs met.

As Corey Robin explained,
contesting the capitalist conception of freedom in the New York
Times:

When my wellbeing
depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the
market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination.
Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the
boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to
sell for the sake of survival.

Socialists present
a break with the logic of capital not simply by elevating policies that would
downwardly redistribute wealth, but also through redistributing power.
Injecting more democracy into the economy, taking the distribution
of basic services out of private hands, divesting from the military, and
building rank-and-file power in the workplace would all
fundamentally challenge current power relations. And that’s why the Trump
administration is taking the threat posed by this new socialist upsurge so
seriously.

The Truth About
M4A

It’s not just
Tuesday’s report. Earlier this month, President Trump penned an op-ed in USA
Today directly criticizing Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All plan,
claiming that it would somehow “eviscerate Medicare” and “threaten America’s
seniors.” Of course, the plan would do no such thing, seeing as how it’s
predicated on expanding the existing program — which functionally serves as a
single-payer system — to all Americans. And as Sanders himself pointed
out, Trump’s case is “full of lies.”

But one thing
Trump did get right in his op-ed is that a full 64 percent of House Democrats,
along with fifteen Democratic senators, have signed on to Sanders’s plan. And
in nearly half of all the races that Democrats are contesting this fall, their
candidates are backing Medicare for All. That’s a massive shift from just two
years ago, when few national Democrats openly favored such a plan. Even Hillary
Clinton said in 2016 that single-payer health care would “never, ever come to
pass.”

Sensing the
surging popularity of Medicare for All, the CEA authors devote over a dozen
pages to criticizing the policy. Yet, as Sarah Kliff points out,
the report “inadvertently makes a case for single-payer” by showing that
Medicare recipients in the United States actually face shorter wait times than
those who hold private insurance. Oops.

A Flawed Critique

Accidental
arguments for single-payer aside, the entire premise of the CEA critique of
socialism misses the mark. After pointing to the failures of farming and food
production under Stalin and Mao — models which, as far as I’m aware, no
socialist politicians or Democratic Socialists of America organizers are
advocating for — the authors claim that “the lessons from socialized
agriculture carry over to government takeovers of oil, health insurance, and
other modern industries: They produce less rather than more.”

The implication is
that socialist policies would result in scarcity — bread lines, famine, and
rationed care. For socialists, however, the goal is not to eliminate
production, but to shift it from boosting corporate profits to serving human
needs. As Meagan Day explains, “Our goal is not to rein in the
excesses of capitalism for a few decades at a time — we want to end our
society’s subservience to the market.”

Medicare for All
would replace the current system of private health insurance, which would spell
the end of the industry. But it would do so in service of making health care a
human right that all people have access to regardless of their ability to pay,
and base our care provision on that proposition. Current plans for instituting
Medicare for All — including Sanders’s — also incorporate job training for
health insurance workers to gain employment in other fields that would be more
productive for society.

When it comes to
the oil industry, socialists are clear that avoiding the worst effects of
climate change — spelled out in detail in the recent IPCC report —
requires leaving current fossil fuel reserves in the ground and immediately
transitioning to renewable energy. That would mean stunting the oil industry’s
growth, but it would be in service of the continued existence of our
civilization. And energy production would massively increase in solar, wind,
and other renewable sources instead of fossil fuels.

Another bizarre
claim made in the report is that “Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less
progressive than US taxes.” That statement may come as a surprise to Amazon CEO
and US resident Jeff Bezos, the richest man on Earth whose company paid zero in
federal income taxes last year and has avoided $20.4 billion
in state taxes since its founding in 1994. Also, because he lives in Washington
State which has a notoriously regressive tax system, Bezos personally pays
no state income taxes.

This type of tax
avoidance is commonplace among US-based corporate behemoths and the super rich
— including President Trump himself who has boasted about it.
If such a system is considered “progressive” by CEA standards, the bar has been
set to a new low.

Naming the Class
Enemy

One point that the
report largely gets right is the fact that, throughout history, socialists have
been effective at directly identifying their political opponents: “The
socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the
bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations
(Sanders and Warren).” While Warren, who has clearly stated “I
am a capitalist,” may disagree with being named in such a list, she and Sanders
have been effective at contesting the obscene role of corporate power in
influencing our political system.

What has set
Sanders apart, as Bhaskar Sunkara points out in the Guardian, is
his insistence that a movement challenging the “billionaire
class” and building working-class power is the only force that can truly
transform the American political system, turning it away from oligarchy and
toward democracy. And Sanders has set out to help bring about such a
transformation under the label of democratic socialism.

Why They’re Scared

With growing
support for socialist policies and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
now counting over fifty thousand members and running candidates in races across
the country opposing the Trump administration’s policies on the economy,
immigration, housing, health care, and more, it shouldn’t come as a shock that
the White House is attempting to tamp down on this swelling movement.

Yet while the
Council of Economic Advisers expresses concern in droll, wonkish prose about
the supposed evils of socialism, conservative activists are much more focused
on instilling reactionary narratives and rolling back democratic rights
throughout US society.

Rather than trying
to win over Americans by offering better policies, the Right is instead
countering the Left’s success in the court of public opinion by
disenfranchising voters, stoking racial animus, blanketing the airwaves with
conservative propaganda, and bankrolling far-right candidates. Their strange
pro-capitalist academic screed through official White House channels is just
the intellectual side of that project.

The Trump
administration has every reason to be scared. Socialists are building a
movement.

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs